What Is The Real Value Of A Facebook Page Like?

Automotive Social Media | Car Dealer Digital Advertising

As a full service digital marketing agency we are asked one questions when we talk about social media far more often than we would like. what is this questions?

How many likes can you get is within X time period?

I have to be honest with you when I tell you that I absolutely hate that this is the most commonly asked questions when we are talking about social media. In all honesty I would wager a bet that Mr. Zuckerberg himself doesn’t want people to be asking or thinking about this either!

Regardless of whether we like or not, the fact remains that this is the most pressing questions on our customers minds when they think about Social Media (in particular Facebook) marketing. While other companies might be willing to indulge a bad questions with a bad response, we prefer to change the entire mindset of the customer and point the direction of the conversation from volume to quality. More specifically to talking about engagement versus an arbitrary number of people that have pressed the like button on your fan page.

What is a Like?

A Facebook page like is essentially a person that has visited your business page and decided to like it. Once an individual likes the page, they are able to receive updates in their feed whenever you add a new status update on your business fan page.

The fact that they like your page will also appear on the individual’s timeline for all their personal friends to see. Once they are connected to your page you are able to essentially market through your Facebook page directly to all of the “fans” of your page.

It’s natural that when your potential customers visit your fan page, you want to have a large number of people that are a fan of your page. This shows what we call “social proof” of your products, services, and your reputation. This is about the only correlation between having a large number of likes on your business page and a positive net benefit to your business.

What Is The Correlation Between Likes and Potential Business Opportunities For My business?

Now here is a question that merits some discussion!

There are scores of new companies starting up and offering page likes for a very low cost. When you hire a automotive social media company and ask them how many page likes they can get you, if they are responding with a definitive number… it’s time to worry about how they are acquiring those likes and just who those people are that they intend to get to like your page.

Buying likes is typically going to get you a triple dose of bad. Paid likes are typically not going to be in the vicinity of your business, they are most likely not interested in what you offer, and worse yet they may very well be fake Facebook accounts.

If you are going to organically grow your like count, it’s impossible to give an exact number of likes you are going to generate for a business page. If you put 100 people in a room and ask them if they like seafood, you might think you will know a roundabout percentage that will say yes, but how can you possibly say that 70 will yes within 1.5 minutes? You can’t, unless you have paid off at least 70 of those people to respond in the way you want within the time frame you want, in which case you are not really getting a true finding from that group. So it is with social media. People are individuals, each of us have different tastes and motivations. It’s impossible to promise a definitive number of likes within a certain time period unless you are going to rigging the game!

This leads into our biggest discussion when we talk about automotive social media. Forget about the volume of likes on your page and ask yourself what kind of engagement you are getting from real people that are potential customers in your backyard!

It’s All About Engagement!

If you are selling cars in Brooklyn, New york, why would you want thousands of people from India, Pakistan, or even Sarasota, Florida to like your page? Worse yet why would you pay someone to get them to like your page? Are these people going to potentially buy a car or refer a family member to buy a car from your dealership?

You know the answer to those questions.. it’s NO!

So what SHOULD you be doing on Facebook? How do you go about getting real fans who are going to be potential buyers to like and engage with your Facebook page?

We recently wrote a guest post on Driving Sales called Facebook Marketing: Are You Doing It Right? We encourage you to take a look at that post to get ideas about how to properly grow your Facebook page following organically in a meaningful way. You can get some ideas on how you can reach out in a positive way to local people that have a good chance of becoming a sales opportunity and how to use them to help you market your own pages to their local friends and family.

For the purposes of this article we want to talk about what engagement is. Engagement is getting real people that are potential customers for your business to like, comment, or share your content on your Facebook business page. If you are stuffed with fake profiles liking your page and people that are not interested in what you do or are in another country, how likely do you think they will be to engage with the content you are providing through your business page? The answer is not very likely!

If you cultivate a real community on your fan page that is within a realistic buying radius from your business and has some type of personal tie in to the content you are providing, you will have a far greater chance of really engaging with that person through your content.

Our CEO often described Facebook as a cocktail party. You wouldn’t want to go to a party with people that you have absolutely nothing in common with and will likely never see again. You also wouldn’t want to be the person at the cocktail party that is incessantly talking about selling your products or services the first time you shake hands with someone! You want to be the charming likeable person that everyone is gathered around as you tell about the good you are doing in your community, finding out what others are doing in the same community, and sharing tasteful & funny anecdotes that everyone can relate too! Once they like you it’s only natural to talk about work, what you both do and eventually how you can save them money on your products.

That is the proper way to engage with someone at a cocktail party. It’s called a soft sell and that’s exactly what Facebook pages are built for. You NEED to let your fans know about everything you are doing in the community. You NEED to let them know about any free tickets to local sports games you might have and make a fun giveaway out of it. You NEED to show them your satisfied customers and how those customers feel about doing business with you. Ask those customers to take a picture or a video and let you post it on your Facebook page. Tag them in it and let them share it with their family and friends! Your hard selling should be sprinkled into your Facebook marketing strategy like seasoning on a steak. Too much and you overpower the real flavor, but just enough gets the job done perfectly!

Engagement metrics are provided by Facebook page insights. You can see how many people are viewing your posts, how many are liking them, sharing them, and commenting (talking about) them. This is the true measure of how good of a job you are doing with your Facebook marketing strategy. If people are truly interested in your business or what you are promoting, they will engage with your content. It’s up to you (or the company you hire to implement a comprehensive Automotive social media marketing strategy) to organically grow your pool of quality Facebook fans and continually engage them in a meaningful way over time. Only by doing the hard work will you reap the rewards of having a positive image of your business on Facebook and opening up new potential customers to your dealership.